From a NAS to a full-fledge homelab with spare parts
It all started with a QNAP NAS to backup my raw photography’s and have some way to store other media files. Then some smart home devices randomly appeared. And then some enhancements needed to be done to a proper way to stream audio and video to my LG dumb smart TV. Then an UPS to safekeep the system operation. And from simple things with simple goals, piece by piece, we end up with a complex soup of things that somehow work. This details what I call my current homelab, and gives the main ideas on how you can build one yourself… if you really want to.
So, complex things start with the simplest of the objectives, in the case, storing and backup my always growing storage of both RAW and processed photographs from my other hobby. After some evaluation of the available alternatives I ended up with a QNAP TS-328 3-bay NAS with 2Gb of RAM with RAID 5 support. Loaded it up with 3 4Tb 3.5 HDDs and we are up and running with 8Tb usable storage.
Of course the minimalist purpose of storing photographs was only the start. Soon after I started dumping my media library into it and streaming it to my devices via the old DLNA. And struggling with the bad performance of the transcoding of the ARM Cortex-A53 4-core 1.4 GHz processor (even if it says that supports up to 1080p) — the secret lies in stating “up to” and not fully support it.
